Word: beria
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Ironically, Andropov may owe his rise to the bungling of one of the nation's most notorious secret police chiefs, Lavrenti Beria. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the tiny Georgian with the trademark pincenez tried to bully his way to power by incorporating the Ministry of the Interior into his vast security empire. That incautious move roused a vengeance-minded Politburo to action. Beria was arrested and executed. First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, in a famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, vowed that the state security forces would be subservient to the principles of "revolutionary...
...Insurance Co. Behind the headquarters is the most celebrated KGB structure, Lubyanka Prison, through which tens of thousands of Soviet citizens have passed on their way to concentration camps or execution. These probably included three of Stalin's own secret police chiefs-Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria-who were shot following their fall from power. The KGB has administrative offices in every major center, and KGB officers occupy key posts in the Soviet armed forces and the regular police, as well as in factories, government offices, universities and most other major Soviet institutions...
Andropov is the first KGB head since Beria to sit on the Politburo. He is a party man, not an agency professional. His most notable previous post: Soviet Ambassador in Budapest, where he helped put down the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Among Andropov's most important functions is to keep the KGB under firm party control so that the secret police can never again wield the power it possessed under Stalin, when it arrested, tortured and killed thousands of loyal party officials...
Best known for "A Report from the Beria Reservation," an account of prison life written during his first incarceration, Moroz taught modern Ukrainian history before his arrest in August...
...extraordinary behavior of supercold helium-helium II-which acts as a perfect fluid, so lacking in viscosity that it will creep over the wall of a glass container. After World War II, Kapitsa was placed under house arrest in what was apparently a dispute with Secret Police Chief Lavrenti Beria, who was then also head of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Finally released after Stalin's death, he resumed the direction of his own Moscow Institute for Physical Problems, helped promote the idea of an entire city, Akademgorodok, devoted to science and, along with Physicist Andrei Sakharov, became...